The Best Australian Poems 2011 (9 page)

I dream the films I'll never make.

They have misty titles like

‘Boy at a Window', ‘Shadow of a Dog',

‘Odalisque/Oblique'. They would play

short seasons in empty cinemas.

‘Self Portraits' consists of fake after fake.

‘Young Loves or the Fang of Time'

is shot with persistent, nostalgic lust

in black and white and blurs of poppy.

‘South Coast Trilogy' has the distant haze

of over-exposure, of things long lost

that no longer matter, except to me –

flying sometimes, crawling sometimes,

from too much memory.

buy some strong alcohol at changi

but don't drink it

 

attractive face pileup

 

each feature a harbinger

it's eyes that wear uniforms

 

pinching those witnesses

from the picture

 

‘what colour do you call that'

 

/

 

that's what my eyes call it

In Sydney,

our absence is visible.

 

Most cities just fall away,

like a tale out of steam.

 

But Sydney abrupts to a light-cave:

a cavern of leaf-scrawls and glare.

 

High up, you get to subsume it: your
outlook
.

 

But down there and in it,

you hack through a bright lack of interest;

a steep disregard for potential, or goodness, or mood.

 

Mostly, we like to believe

there's a shore for each utterance.

 

But you can't always reach one. Not here.

 

Where the bush can pop up almost anywhere …

 

It is why we're so smiley. And doubtful. And vaguely bereft.

 

No point in getting upset if there's nobody there.

 

And they're pretty as this.

Two x-rays of spotted quolls

flutter-slip into a wafer of sunlight in a clearing

where a National Parks ranger

pins the boned celluloid

to a viewing table of lit, woven grass

then stands back to assess the inner, carnivorous life.

She removes her greater glider mask

and the hairclip she's fashioned

from coral tree thorns.

There is blood on her wrist.

Under her gathered hair

her neck is redolent of an embrace

whose details are still alive in her

after thirty years.

The x-rays blow away

with a sound all transparencies make

when no longer useful.

A stopped cloud turns the scene

into a waiting room on a farm

inside the head of the husband

of a bipolar ranger.

Let it rain, darling, he says, with the kind of understanding

you sometimes find

in the eyes of wild animals, at close range

and it does rain, and for a very long time.

Unlicensed I drive along roads I know well,

in the same year

a widower and great-grandfather.

At dusk my mind takes a short walk

and visits

the burial place on a hill.

 

With the cattle gone

the land is coming back,

the ruined acres are restored.

Birds I've not seen for years

and perennial native grasses

are plentiful again,

and some interloper crimson roses

among blue wattle foliage and red clay

and dogs – my pet wolves – barking through chicken wire

are wet with the evening dew

of doing nothing.

 

We stood as a gramophone cranked out

‘God Save the King'

then sat on a blanket and watched giant shapes

flicker on a sheet that billowed in the night.

 

My kin wore wide-brimmed felt hats.

We believed ourselves royalists

but acted like republicans.

We were pink Anglo-Celts who drove

a scattering of dark-skinned tribes from their titles.

We killed as they killed,

and the dead can't apologise.

 

I drink stolen water

and taste no contamination.

I conserve seeds and flowers and names.

But the world is not a museum – we are not curators.

The ballad's afterglow

is consumed by the future.

i am Lew Welch hurrying

into the hills, vapid fumes of hope streaming behind me;

the entrails of an animal thought extinct.

 

the gun stashed

(not even my friends know i like guns. well they do now.),

but uncomfortable against my skinny ribs, elementally exposed.

 

rap rap rapid words

bubbling so furiously you could ride them

to the mountain top, if such a thing. you know.

 

And this damn gun.

 

the stars blinking on, the day slinking off.

the night welcoming; the salt earth

beckoning my tired bones and feet that

move independently as does that lizard's eyes.

i forget which. i forget which.

 

After all, this is just a story.

 

i am the silence hurrying

down the barrel, down the goat track.

i can't get there fast enough. (what

does it mean to disappear? tell me

 

that.)

the place i'll know or it will know; a

mutual concurrence of exhaustion,

singing like cooling rocks and beasts under the clear eyes of desert.

 

the names of these slopes and valleys

an unrequited love. (dimming now but methinks

that's just the light.) musical and terrifying. as if San Fran or Chicago never existed.

and why i took it or why it took me

as mysterious as the word

‘posthumous'.

 

And then there's this thing the gun wants; an irrefutable quiet.

 

as if Lew Welch never existed.

When I say that history was my favourite

I'm thinking less of the Weimar Republic

or the militarisation of Japan

than Miss R's contralto discipline

and her homemade Chanel suits.

 

For her I spend my afternoons

between the light blue covers

of the Cambridge History of England.

Pendant mes vacances

my special project is Eleanora Duse.

 

When she asks if she can keep it

I am nonchalant as hell.

It is not the delicate detail, for the cast is too crude

for that: this girl's face obliterated by weeping plaster,

 

a man's extremities reduced to rounded stumps. It is

the large arrested gesture that tells these bodies, saying:

 

So this is the shape of death
. Familiar lovers fastened

on a stone bed (whereas life might have ripped them apart),

 

a dog's high-pitched contortion, an entire family sleeping,

the baby rolled absently from its mother.

 

Unburied, they weigh more than bone ever could.

They have shaken off the ash and refuse to rest. So many

 

stopped limbs. Mouth holes, eye holes, a balled fist.

But in the end, this is what halts you: how a young woman sits

 

with her knees drawn up to her chest, hands covering eyes.

How a child's body folds, alone at the final moment –

 

and a man rises from his bed, as if waking for the first time.

It's 5.30 a.m.

God and I stand

on the verandah.

I'm surprised to see

him smoking a pipe.

‘I don't do the drawback,'

he says. His corduroy trousers

are the colour of wheat-stubble

and the deep pockets of his moss-green

cardigan exude an earthy smell.

His voice seems to rise

out of his pipe-smoke

as he asks how I like the morning.

I tell him that the rosy glow

hovering on the horizon

reminds me of the liquor

I got when I poached

the white peaches last summer.

He sucks on his pipe and nods.

‘What are you on about?' I ask.

He stares at the limpid sky.

The pipe gently ignites.

A puff of smoke ascends

and becomes a cumulonimbus.

‘Looks like rain,' he says.

‘You'd better go in.'

I speak of love in one pan; love for potatoes

love in a tablet, love and debts or sermons.

I mistook pleasure-giving for a seedtext –

two cowboys and a pickaxe – sheepdogs

nudging ewes for a droplet. Needleworking

guts as a cat lopes, a cat disappears like a dumb seed

nosing into the folds of a sheep's fleece. A cat

is in love, in love with Russia, with minerals and

rivers. The way we love borders. The way we

learned to love physics, the way we used to

love globalisation. THE WAY WE LOVE

TECHNOLOGY! Loving difference or Buddhism.

Pornographic or scatological loves at odds with

chance. Love so slovenly, so clumsy. I love it and

I tell it. I abandoned illiteracy as untrustworthy.

Sew up the sheep's neck with stitches where it

was bitten by an overachieving dog, you will find

that the neck tastes as catnip, a zone for loose and

metallic thinking, stretched out, guts airing.

Someone's gonna read this, this love like police presence.

And voices come over the back fences, and the
phttt phttt phttt

of the sprinkler throwing out streamers of crystals

past the bleached wooden posts

into the shadows

on the cracked path of the laneway.

The shadows are from the trees in the backyards

– there are no trees in the lane –

only tufts of grass between the cracks

and here and there, a yellow daisy

in the windless half-light. If you stretch your neck

you can just see the lucky people in the backyards.

They laugh in the sunlight, the wind lifts their hair,

their clothes are bright squares of colour.

But the ache in your neck means

you cannot strain for long; you drop back

to the hot dirt and look through the shadows

to where the lane rises into a darkness you've never noticed.

You walk past the yards, past entire lives lived

while you were sleeping, toward the slow murmur of the others

at the end of the laneway. But everyone who matters

is further ahead or hasn't arrived. And you wonder,

Was all that writing about the dead a game? As the last crystal drop

disappears without a trace in the dirt at your feet, was it real

or was it a dream?

 

You wonder, Is the dirt at your feet real? The last crystal drop

disappearing without a trace must be a dream. Maybe

while you were sleeping, everyone who mattered

arrived and went further ahead.

If you walk past the slow murmur from the backyards,

you will surely find the others at the end of the laneway

beyond the rise where the shadows drop into darkness.

You cannot be bothered straining to look into the lives

of the people in their hot backyards: many will be sleeping. Why

stretch your luck when the world here has so many bright squares

of colour: tufts of grass, a yellow daisy. It is odd

the way the dappled shadows shift across the cracks:

there are no trees in the lane.

The windless half-light lies down

on the cracked path. And the stream of pale crystals that wet

the bleached wood posts are unstrung in the laneway. They fall

and are still as the sprinkler goes
phttt … pht … tt … ph … t … t

and the voices over the back fences stop.

The hills arrived and I kept driving.

With every civic car park this theory

Of joint tenancy grew more abstract.

There were shared passwords

And beds unmade with abandon,

But I didn't want to ruin

Our argument with the past.

Citing roadkill would be callow

So I sent back cards

Left blank for your thoughts.

I counted ructions

And the miles between them.

Where the road withered

Lay a Switzerland of the heart.

Everything is ominous.

–

Another ordered loneliness.

–

The future is fatal.

–

Even the open field, a labyrinth.

–

The afternoon idly flicks through the pages of itself.

–

A list of names: good news, or bad?

–

The long silence of rooms.

–

History with its morphine headache.

–

The anonymous rain falling on motels.

–

The atrocities played under flickering streetlights.

–

The cars parked under melodramatic weather.

–

Finally, every future is fatal.